In Harrisburg, Pennsylvania the nuclear power plant is being refurbished and reused under a 20-year purchase power agreement with Microsoft to supply carbon-free energy to its data centers. This type of arrangement could happen in our NW region as well. Here is a summary from a news article explaining the recent announcement:
“The plan to restart Three Mile Island’s Unit 1 comes amid something of a renaissance for nuclear power, as policymakers are increasingly looking to it to bail out a fraying electric power supply, help avoid the worst effects of climate change and meet rising power demand driven by data centers. Buying the power is designed to help Microsoft meet its commitment to be “carbon negative” by 2030.
The business model of the Constellation-Microsoft agreement makes sense for both sides, Buongiorno said. Plus, it is cheaper to restart a nuclear power plant than build one from scratch, he said. Already intact are transmission lines, cooling towers, the control buildings and concrete containment structures, he said. Constellation’s announcement comes after a wave of coal-fired and nuclear power plants have shut down in the past decade as competition from cheap natural gas flooded power markets.
That has elicited warnings that the U.S. is facing an electric reliability crisis. Meanwhile, demand is fast-growing from data centers run by tech giants like Meta, Amazon, Microsoft and Google to provide cloud computing and digital services such as artificial intelligence systems. The data centers’ share of U.S. electricity use in the United States is around 4% currently, with some projections expecting that to double by 2030. Before it was shut down in 2019, Three Mile Island’s Unit 1 had a generating capacity of 837 megawatts, which is enough to power more than 800,000 homes. (Associated Press, M Levy, 9.20.24)
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